Submarines, sex scandals, and why the Gotland Class

Mystery: Sweden, a neutral country of 9 million residents, has not engaged in war since 1814. Yet, it not only deploys state-of-the-art submarines, Kockums builds them for other countries. The question is, why?

The following is based in part on an article by Andrew Anthony published in guardian.co.uk Sunday 1 August 2010. The facts have been checked and prove, once again, truth can be stranger than fiction.

...It's not necessarily in the system, or the state, or the police, or under the sea. note 1

In 1972. Lindberg (above) completed his law degree. On 30 July 2010, he was convicted of several sex offenses, including rape, and sentenced to prison by the Södertörn District Court.[5]

Sweden's dark side - ...in 2000, a commercial sex act was passed that was seen at the time as a victory for radical feminism. It was made legal to sell sex, but illegal to buy it. ...A few days after Lindberg appeared in court, the employment minister, Sven Otto Littorin, tendered his resignation when he learned that a newspaper was about to run a story claiming he paid for sex with a prostitute four years ago. ...

Cecilia Malmström, Sweden's EU commissioner and member of Uppsala police board when Lindberg was police chief, said: "I have no words. I am extremely shocked. This is a man who has dedicated his career to fight for women's rights. I feel physically sick when I think about this."

"Fifty years ago Littorin would have had to resign if he was gay. Now we have not only criminalised the buying of sex but we've also stigmatised it to such an extent, he has to resign just because of the mere suspicion. Just as the gay man has been normalised, so the heterosexual buyer has been pathologised. To satisfy society's need for normality, you need something that is not normal. Now that is the sex buyer."

- Petra Ostergren, critic of the commercial sex laws, has been ostracised by former feminist allies.

By the 1970s it was ranked as one of the three wealthiest nations in the world. ...In the 1980s Sweden began to pull back from the enormous state intervention and social reform that had guided the country for the previous half-century. And early in that transformation, on 28 February 1986, the prime minister, Olof Palme was shot and killed in the street by an assassin who has never been found.... - – Palme's widow, Lisbet – refused to co-operate fully with the court, for reasons she has never explained.

See note 1 for the likely answer to why Sweden even builds state-of-the-art submarines to this day.

note 1 - Submarine incursions into Swedish waters that occurred during the 1980s, have been a subject of lingering controversy. Were the mystery subs Soviet or NATO vessels? There is growing evidence that some, if not all, of the incursions were Nato submarines, and persistent rumours in diplomatic circles that Palme knew of and agreed to their presence, as a means of affording protection from the Soviet Union. - Andrew Anthony

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Submarines are always silent and strange.